[Aglets-developer] Aglet thread sleep support!

[Luca F. <cat...@us...>]

Hi,
I've just posted a few changes to the CVS in order to support the 
sleep(..) operation over an agent. In other words, being in an aglet 
code is now possible to call the special method sleep(long timeout) to 
suspend an agent for the specified timeout.
The sleep operation has been implemented as follows: the message manager 
is suspended, that means it continues enqueing incoming messages but it 
does not process them; then the current thread is set to sleep and, when 
the sleep ends, the message manager wakes up. Once the message manager 
wakes up, other came messages are processed. This means that, while an 
agent is sleeping, no messages are processed, and this is right 
accordingly to the sleep semantic.
However, this also means that the thread in charge of delivering the 
message, e.g., another agent, waits until the agent wakes up. This can 
be a problem, since a sending agent has no idea of how many seconds the 
receiver agent will sleep. To overtake this limitation (and here I need 
your opinion guys), I created a special thead, the 
com.ibm.aglets.thread.DeliveryMessageThread, that is a thread in charge 
of delivering a message. Thus, this glue thread, simply takes care of 
the message, waiting until the addresse agent wakes up, and then it 
delivers the message. Of course, the deliver is now asynchronous and the 
  sender agent/thread can continue with its work. If the reply is 
required, the sender must use the future reply facility, because the 
delivery thread does not provide any mechanism to control it.
What do you think?

Luca
-- 
+-------------------------------+
Luca Ferrari
cat...@us...

The Aglets Project:
http://aglets.sourceforge.net
+-------------------------------+